


See the forest through the trees

by relenafanel



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Derek and Cora travel across the states, Gen, Hale Family Feels, M/M, Mostly Gen, Road Trips, Texting, and soul searching, but can be read as derek/stiles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-31
Updated: 2013-08-31
Packaged: 2017-12-25 06:09:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/949558
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/relenafanel/pseuds/relenafanel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Derek didn’t expect his phone to come out of the side pocket of his old duffle bag, the one he dragged across country with him from New York for what was supposed to be a quick stop in Beacon Hills to find out why Laura had stopped checking in with him.  He thought that eventually he’d allow the battery to drain and he’d buy a new phone with a new number instead of facing the long list of contacts who were either gone or best left behind.</p><p>And that was exactly what happened.</p>
            </blockquote>





	See the forest through the trees

**Author's Note:**

> A texting fic, but not the texting fic you expect from me.
> 
> Reposted from [my tumblr](http://relenafanel.tumblr.com/) with changes.

Derek didn’t expect his phone to come out of the side pocket of his old duffle bag, the one he dragged across country with him from New York for what was supposed to be a quick stop in Beacon Hills to find out why Laura had stopped checking in with him.  He thought that eventually he’d allow the battery to drain and he’d buy a new phone with a new number instead of facing the long list of contacts who were either gone or best left behind.

 

And that was exactly what happened.

 

He and Cora headed north. The first day they went as far as Derek could drive before exhaustion finally crept in and he felt like he might need help unlocking his fingers from around the steering wheel.  He felt stiff and sore and _old_ in a way he hadn't allowed himself to feel while still within town limits.  He slept for eighteen hours in a small, bed bug ridden motel outside of Seattle, and when he woke up he felt an acute panic over the fact Cora wasn’t in the room with him anymore.  Her scent was still present, uncomplicated by fear or the sour undertones of worry, but he still couldn’t relax until he tracked her to a diner three blocks away, catching up with her just as she pushed the door open with her arms full of take out.  He could smell the strawberry banana milkshake and spiced fries as she raised her eyebrows at him, not in surprise but with definite judgement. 

 

“Your favourite,” she said, going back into the diner and placing the food on the table, pushing the milkshake towards him.   He stared at her for a moment, because the mixture had been something he enjoyed when life had been far less complicated, but that had been a long time ago.   Derek wasn’t sure if he’d even tried to drink a milkshake since he was fourteen and spending the afternoon with his sisters in the park.

 

Cora didn’t know the person he’d become, but neither did Derek know her likes and dislikes anymore, because she was no longer the child who played in the dark beneath the porch and only ate Lucky Charms for lunch on the weekends (but never breakfast).  He didn't know very much about this version of Cora at all.  He just knew he didn’t want to lose her again.  He _couldn't._

 

“Wait here,” he told her, crossing the street and purchasing two prepaid cell phones.  By the time he returned, his food was going cold and the milkshake has a more liquid consistency than usual, but Cora had taken them out of the bag and arranged them on the table in front of him, and it did look aesthetically pleasing in a way that called to the fourteen year old boy she remembered enjoying this kind of stuff.  It made him think of the last time they all sat around the diner in Beacon Hills, Laura stuffing her face with so many of the shared potato wedges that her cheeks puffed out, not leaving any for Derek after he made sure Cora had her share.

 

It was maybe the first fond memory he'd had for a very, very long time, and while it wasn't untainted by grief, the fact that he remembered it at all made it all the more precious.

 

He wasn’t entirely sure what he was doing, but he snapped a picture with his new phone before tossing the second one to her.  “So I can find out where you are without tracking you down next time,” he told her, grateful that she seemed to understand what he was and wasn’t saying, and didn’t try to call him on what Laura would have named separation anxiety bullshit.

 

Later, he stared at the picture on his phone, unsure why he had bothered taking it.  Outside of Beacon Hills, he didn’t feel as though the world was closing in on him, and there was a profound ache in his chest that he couldn’t seem to dispel no matter how deeply he breathed. 

 

His fingers typed a familiar number into his phone, and he sent the picture before he could think better of it.  He didn’t receive an answer, but he didn’t expect to.  Too much time had passed since the last time he had used the number, and there was no guarantee that Laura’s number was still connected to Laura’s phone, lost somewhere in the forest she died in.

 

They kept heading north, a few hours at a time.  Derek slept more than he had in the last year, the stranger in the mirror with the gaunt cheeks, pale skin and dark, hollow eyes slowly taking the shape of someone more familiar, but equally a stranger, unfathomably changed by recent events.  They weren’t in a hurry because the only thing they were running from would always be on their heels, no matter how quickly they moved away from the town they once called home.  The past was fickle and intrusive like that, and there was very little they could do to escape what had happened except through moving forward.

 

Derek understood that the type of moving forward they had to do had nothing to do with how many miles they drove each day, but with Beacon Hills still a noticeable smear in the rear view mirror, he couldn’t find it in himself to care.

 

In Seattle, he took a picture of the Space Needle at a truly unfortunate angle and listened as Cora outlined a step by step plan to climb to the top, until he wasn’t sure if she was doing it for fun or actually planned to try.  She laughed at the look he gave her, and jarred his shoulder with hers while calling him a spoil sport.

 

For a moment, the vise around his heart, constricting his lungs, eased.

 

They stayed for two days in Seattle before wandering north again.

 

Cora loved the ocean, always had.  As a child she would tumble into the surf the moment they got to the beach and would stay in the water until their mother called her out for food.  It was just one of those things understood in their family: Laura loved the forest, Cora loved the water, and Derek loved… Derek always seemed content with either.

 

He took a picture of a small coastal town with the fog obscuring the streets and the sunlight a dim, glowing prospect.  Cora didn’t laugh at the Twilight reference he made, only stared in confusion as he shook so hard with silent laughter, he had to sit on a bench just to remain upright.  He had no idea if she just hadn’t understood the reference or didn’t think him funny, but he wasn’t going to be the one to introduce the land of Forks to her.  Maybe Laura would have, in another lifetime.

 

He awoke from a nightmare to a hand on his arm and fingers brushing his face, blinking up in confusion when he was faced with his sister, her fingers damp with his tears and her lips pressed into a sharp, concerned line.

 

They moved east this time, moving quicker now that the terrain held very little familiarity.  This was the second time he’d fled from Beacon Hills with just a car, a small bundle of belongings, and a single sister who was all he had left in the world.

 

Because Derek loved… unconditionally.  Completely.  Guilelessly in a way that hung around his neck like an albatross. 

 

Derek didn’t tell Cora that sometimes he still texted their dead sister.  Cora wasn’t his consolation prize for a past that only piled more heartache onto his already broken psyche, and Derek didn’t want her to suspect that she was.  They didn't have the same history anymore, but they shared the same kind of heartache at what they had lost, and the same conflicted wonder at finding each other.

 

He found himself sending more and more nonsensical things to Laura’s phone, never storing the number and always texting by memory.  He sent her images of funny town signs, detoured about five hours out of their way to hit Riverside, Iowa so he could get a picture of a plaque announcing that the town was the future birthplace of James T. Kirk.  He sent her a picture of the Toyota with a steel rod through the windshield, an accident caused by a truck losing part of its load over the highway.  Cora gave him knowing, assessing looks for the entire time they were stuck between Toledo and Cleveland, but didn’t say a word about the fact he had swerved at the last second in front of a family of five.

 

They reached New York a month after leaving California.  No one would claim they made good time, but Derek wasn’t sure what they would find once they arrived.  The condo fees for the apartment were still being taken out of the Hale accounts, but with no one on site, Derek couldn’t guarantee there was anything left to go back to, and it was all he had left from the sister who was no longer alive.  Cora was a solid presence by his side as he tried the lock for the first time in almost a year, the key sticking.

 

He knew his little sister now, better than he had before they left.  There was nothing quite like the intimacy of road tripping across country to discover someone’s likes and dislikes, to be able to read their moods and the nuances of their profile.

 

Derek could tell that Cora felt unsettled, receding into the shadows of Laura’s memory the more they stayed in their Brooklyn condo. 

 

He suggested they move on after two weeks passed and Cora didn’t seem to be any more comfortable than she was when they arrived.  They were both haunted by the ghost of the sister who had lived, survived Beacon Hills and the Hale curse once, only to die by the cruel hand of the town they were never going back to.  It was foolish, but Derek felt like he could keep them both alive if they just stayed away, but New York wasn’t home anymore, either, couldn’t be without Laura’s laugh to keep him company.

 

Cora took an old hoodie of Laura’s that had originally belonged to their mother.  It was falling apart now, seams unraveling at the cuffs, and it was unarguably the most prized possession they owned.  She took Laura’s jewellery, citing something about sisterly duty, and an expensive designer dress Derek could remember Laura finding at a thrift store and screaming in delight.  Derek took Laura’s diary, knowing it was more a scrap book of memories and stories she could remember about the Hale family, about those who had already died.  She agonized over it for hours, asking him to fact check questions he couldn’t answer.  He packed it back into his duffle, and left New York again on another journey that was, at its core, to protect his family.

 

They left the furniture but kept the electronics, because there was something impersonal about toasters, televisions, and iPod docks, whereas the couch still held the scent of the cat Laura had bought a year into living in New York, only for it to die about eight months later. 

 

The couch still held the scent of Laura, in a profound way that had Derek’s fingers moving over the buttons on his phone, composing a text he wasn’t sure if he could send.  Up to that point, he’d never sent Laura words, just images, when he felt what he had lost so intensely that he needed to reach out to the person he missed the most of all these days.

 

_I wish you weren’t dead._

 

He didn’t send it until they were a week out of Brooklyn, his name on a monthly lease for a small two bedroom apartment with a view of the Atlantic Ocean that delighted Cora in a way she didn’t have to express in words.  The town looked too much like Beacon Hills for Derek, small towns always did.  There had been an unspoken agreement between he and Laura that the bigger the city, the better.  They’d spent time in Vegas, in the early days, before heading to New York.

 

Derek didn’t prefer the forest or the ocean, because the thing that mattered most to him was making his sisters happy.

 

The response was almost instantaneous:

 

_I’m not dead yet, asshole._

 

For a moment Derek couldn’t breathe.  The phone dropped from his fingers and bounced against the cheap carpet of the apartment.  Laura, he knew, was absolutely dead, and he pushed the small burst of hope back with a ruthlessness that was a familiar tool of his.  Laura, who he’d buried himself, in pieces.  Laura, who he missed so keenly, so absolutely, that the sensation of loss sometimes seemed to be all he understood anymore.  Laura, who hated Star Trek and rolled her eyes at quaint town names, and absolutely refused to take pictures of food.

 

Laura, whose phone number had a New York area code, not a California one.

 

He should have seen the full picture for what it was.

 

He’d never been texting Laura at all.

**Author's Note:**

> After the mid-season finale, [Keri wrote a sterek texting fic](http://archiveofourown.org/users/KeriArentikai/pseuds/KeriArentikai) and I was expressing to her how much I wanted to write a fluffy hilarious texting fic where Derek never returned to BH but still fell in love with Stiles' wit long distance. It sounds like EXACTLY my type of story and she encouraged me to try.
> 
> There can never be enough texting stories, right!
> 
> This is what came out. It's neither fluffy nor hilarious, no one falls in love, and it's kind of brutally angsty (compared to my usual writing).
> 
> But, the origin story is important so you can understand why it ends the way it did, so you can at least laugh at my mental anguish when I wrote this and in a very horrified tone said to Keri "uh, it's not funny, like AT ALL." And she was like "how did you write something not funny? that's not even possible" (ok, she didn't say that... I'm the only one who doesn't think I write angst).
> 
> [Join my tumblr](http://relenafanel.tumblr.com/) and you can have a front row seat to my anguish next time.


End file.
